The Bush Foundation Teacher Effectiveness Initiative: Research isn't the only reason

The Bush Foundation, established in 1953 by former 3M executive Archibald Bush and his wife Edyth, announced a $40M initiative a couple of months ago that aims to produce 25,000 capable teachers in the next 10 years. You can read more about the Teacher Effectiveness Initiative on the Foundation’s website, www.bushfoundation.org.

Also on the website is a link to MPR’s January 14 Morning Show, featuring Susan Heegard, the Foundation’s VP and Educational Achievement Team Leader. Both the broadcast and the website feature a solid research base for the decision to spend the money on preparing and supporting teachers. As a former teacher who did get great training, I think that the grant is a great opportunity to make a difference, and that the Bush Foundation has a well-thought out approach to finding some leverage in the system.

Listening to the broadcast, though, I was struck by the journalists’ singular appeal to abstract reasoning and the lack of any reference to personal experience. Unfortunately, the recording cut out about halfway through the broadcast, so I don’t know whether the discussion got around to the “heart” in the issue.

Setting aside the rhetoric, the debate, yes, even the research (temporarily), what is the starting point for making a difference? These are students’ lives we are talking about. No one would question the general connection between competency and earning power. No one would question the importance of education in the economic well-being of nations. No one would question that learning is the mechanism by which progress occurs. And yet, we question the strategic importance of the teacher’s capability?

This broadcast led me to reflect on my personal experience. My first role models (other than my parents)? Teachers. My favorite classes and later favorite subjects? The ones taught by my best teachers. My initial career goal? Become a teacher. My biggest disappointment in the lives of my kids? Not enough capable teachers.

And yet, I was one of those who left the teaching profession early in my career. It had nothing to do with the classroom, which I have always loved, and little to do with the students, who were the center of my existence. It had everything to do with the way that teachers were afforded plenty of blame, plenty of uninformed criticism, and little respect. I told myself I could always go back, since I was “permanently certified.” But I didn’t.

If the grant can accelerate the return of talented students to the ranks of capable teachers, I believe that measures of success will demonstrate that capable teachers do make a difference. And perhaps, long-term, more of our citizens will remember how important their best teachers were in their own lives. When that happens, perhaps our politicians, regardless of party, will be more comfortable supporting the most important investment that any nation can make in its own citizens.

Gut Feelings: Tell Me What You REALLY Think

Every once in a while I find myself more receptive than usual to ideas that I may have rejected in the past. This may be one of those times.

A couple of years ago, cognitive psychologist and researcher Gerd Gigerenzer published a little paperback that (I'm betting) most of us missed. I would have missed it, too, had I not lived up to a promise my wife and I made to ourselves many years ago. The promise was that anytime we browsed a small, private bookstore we would not walk out without buying at least one book to support the enterprise.

At any rate, I walked out with Gut Feelings, partly because of its intriguing title, partly because of its small size (easy to take on trips), and mostly because of the blurb on the back cover: "Are logic and reasoning overrated?" But I didn't actually start reading it until I needed a book to fit into the front pocket of a binder on my most recent consulting trip - something that I might make a dent in over a long weekend around a customer visit. And I have never been more pleasantly surprised with an little known book.

Let me give you a small sample:

"The Benefits of Simplicity. In an uncertain world, simple rules of thumb can predict complex phenomena as well as or better than complex rules do."

I ask you to think about this. On the one hand, we tend to revere the mathematicians, physicists, and economists who can describe in apparently precise terms the exact quantitative relationships involved in the "complex phenomena" that we deal with increasingly in our daily lives. Yet Gigerenzer can cite multiple studies that demonstrate, for example, that simply dividing up your dollars evenly among multiple investments produces at least as good a long-term result as the most highly rated economic advisors.

Not earthshaking, you say? Maybe not. But in a blog dedicated to thinking, with a lot of space devoted to the virtues of analytical thinking, there are ideas in this book to prompt some re-thinking.

Analytical Skills? No Big Deal

We can teach this stuff. No; correction: we can help learners become aware of the analytical capability that they already have, probably already use in some realms, so that they can use those skills consciously to solve problems in other realms.

What exactly is analysis? I think it is the making of logical distinctions. Ah, and what is a logical distinction? Depends on the nature of the problem.

One kind of logical distinction is abstract, based on characteristics or qualities we attribute to something. So, for example, we think of Italy as a warm climate, Sweden as a cold climate. Warm and cold - adjectives - are words that describe qualities we attribute to things (in this case, places). So here's a simple analytical problem: Classify the following as warm or cold countries: Mexico, Canada, Norway, Ethiopia, Brazil.

How hard was that? If you can do that, you can analyze. More to come.

Teaching and Selling, Learning and Buying

Set aside for a moment any unpleasant experiences you may have had buying a used car, dealing with cold calls from stock brokers, or fending off pushy door-to-door "witnesses." Think about the best buying experiences you have ever had. Now, among those experiences, think about the ones in which you were buying something that involved some type of technical functioning that you were initially less familiar with. Your memory might in fact be a car purchase. Or, if you are like me, it might be a cell phone or crackberry (no brand names in this blog). That person selling to you - whether called a consultant, advisor, expert, or, yes, salesperson - what did he or she do that was memorable in a positive sense?

I'm going to hazard a guess about some of the behaviors of that "advisor" that made the experience positive for you:
-Listening to you
-Asking you questions related to what you needed and wanted
-Taking the trouble to clarify what you meant
-Asking more questions and listening some more
-Pointing out how particular products (or services) specifically addressed what you said you needed
-Waiting patiently, and listening attentively to your comments and questions as you examined the product or service
-Helping to make the purchase itself easy for you

Granted, you may not have that kind of experience every day. But when you have had it, how many of the following experiences occured after you bought?

-A feeling of satisfaction with the buying decision
-A willingness to return to the same place for the next purchase - even if it was a different item
-A desire to seek out the same salesperson to assist with another purchase - even if it was for a completely different item.

So, if you haven't guessed it from the title of this blog post, I'm going to suggest that the salesperson or advisor involved was engaged in as much teaching as selling. I'm also going to suggest that the interaction which occured captured aspects of a buying experience that overlap aspects of an optimal learning experience. And in some future post, I'm going to suggest (as you may have already guessed) that a similar analysis of a positive learning experience looks suspiciously like an optimal buying experience. Then, finally, I'm going to suggest that both salespeople and teachers who reflect on these ideas will see some immediately useful ideas for enhancing the results they get everyday. Please stay tuned in 2010.

The Crowbar Just Opens the Crate...

In this blog, I have made a lot of the power of leverage, of the ability of the crowbar to use leverage to open the crate. It's an analogy that carries a lot of currency in an environment in which problems seem so large, so overwhelming, so difficult to get a handle on. Some of us welcome the simplicity of the humble crowbar that just pries the lid off of that crate.

Of course, getting the crate open is a big deal. Like thinking through the traffic jam to see the real problem, and like getting the right people to sit down to work out an agreement, getting the crate open is more than just a starting point - it's a prerequisite to progress. Until that crate is open, you just don't know what you're going to find inside, so you just don't know what the real problem is. That's the gift of the crowbar.

On the other hand, getting the crate open means seeing what's inside - seeing the problem for what it really is. If you were avoiding the problem, you may not see the crowbar as your friend. Because now (to mix metaphors) you're going to see that body bleeding on the table, and you're going to face that proverbial elephant in the middle of the room.

I can only speak for myself, but I know that I used to avoid that moment of truth -- until I learned the hard way that the problem didn't go away. Sooner or later, I was going to have to get out the more specific tools (say, hammer, wrench and screwdriver?) and start to attack the real problem that was hiding inside the crate.

Using those specific tools, though, is what we learned in school. They are the mathematical formulas to apply, the critical steps in the diagnosis, the analytical assessments that we have practiced, mastered, gotten certified in using. Now that we can see the problem, we can start using those familiar, precise tools and leveraging our subject matter expertise.

We don't need to overuse the crowbar. We just need it to get the crate open.

Rhetorical Question?

Thank the Web for this one. As long as you are there, you are visible. As long as you aren't too outrageous, you are credible.

Today, where we say it, and how we say it may become more important that what we say. It is the age of the flower blooming unnoticed and the manure in the road.

Why is it more important to be on Facebook than to be on target?

The MN History Center and Pink's Empathy

My son and I walk up the ramp into what looks like the side entrance to a World War II paratroop plane. Inside, I push the start button, and we take seats on the bench opposite what appears to be the inside wall of the plane.

A media presentation appears on the wall with a black and white photo from the 1940s - the soldier, with his family. He tells his story of enlisting, choosing to be a paratrooper, going to war.

Then the lights dim, the media presentation goes away, and we hear and feel the sound of jet engines below us revving, rumbling, taking us aloft. Opposite our seats, a dim light in the windows reveals the ocean below us, with signs of a few boats at a distance. The pilot's voice comes on.

It is June 6, 1944, D-Day, and he tells us we are approaching the Normandy coast. The red light is on at the side hatch. He reminds us that when it turns green, we will be clear to jump...

There are flashes in the window. We are hit. The plane is going down.

The entire ride is less than eight minutes, and yet, for the first time in my more than five decades of being alive, I have the visceral sense of the nature of the sacrifices that my parents and their generation made for me. The books never did it; the movies never did it; I had to have some small bit of the experience myself.

The simulation is a part of the Minnesota History Center's current exhibit "Minnesota's Greatest Generation." It is one of many recorded personal stories that fill this exhibit, one that will stick with me.

Its power, it seems to me, comes from the use of at least two of the "right-directed senses" outlined in Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind - story, and empathy. As my son pointed out, we will probably never really understand how it feels to go to war without having had the experience. But at least now I understand that, and can empathize more deeply.

In his chapter on empathy, Pink quotes William Butler Yeats: "People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational expression end by starving the best part of the mind." And in the chapter on story, he quotes Roger Schank: "Humans are not ideally set up to understand logic; they are ideally set up to understand stories."

As I reflect on my immediate few moments of realization after leaving the simulator, I am struck by the truth of both quotes.